Politicians! Get With The Podcasts!
Charlie Wilson is a video editor for CBS News in Washington D.C.
I subscribe to about 20 podcasts (also technically known as RSS Feeds), about a third tech, another third news, and the last news or comedy radio shows. I noticed one new listing back in January for Presidential candidate Barack Obama. I thought this might be interesting since I really didn't know anything about his policies since my beat is defense, so I subscribed hoping to get past the sound-bites and headlines of the Barack vs. Hillary spat which means very little in the large picture. I listened and the delivery was as though he was talking unscripted to a mic and expressing his views. Great, I thought. I looked for others candidates to follow suit, but so far none have decided to use this tool. To my dismay, since Barack's January 31st podcast, his "weekly" podcasts have been zero.
This is a plea to the presidential and local candidates to use this as an opportnity to get your message out unfiltered and a chance to actually explain the "how" promises will be kept. Podcasts can run from a couple of minutes to over an hour so the candidate has all the time he/she needs to explain themselves and why we should select that cadidate of the other. Any conscientious citizen should find out whatever they can about the people who decide their fate from many sources. News organizations have biases, intended or not, and that includes CBS, so more sources the better, and how about drect from the horses mouth, for as long as needed?
Podcasting is relatively simple to set up and post, and since all candidates have young people working for them, the needed equipment and software could be set up by someone in their own staff and have their podcast listed on the iTunes directory. If any candidate reading this needs advice on how to set up a podcast, you can email me at cow@cbsnews.com and I will glad to help you out. This is also a lot cheaper than mass mailings and hitting a target audience. If you have your own website anyway, you already have the storage and bandwidth to provide podcasts to your potential voters.
Also, after you are elected, you can keep us informed of what you are doing, and the problems you encounter. Keeping the public in the loop can keep you out of serious dodo if we understand the why of what you are doing or not doing.
Now to the voters. If you are interested in listening to podcasts, you do not need an iPod, only a podcatching program on your computer. iTunes is the most popular, but there are others like ipodder.org and podcastalley.com. RSS stands for "Relatively simple Syndication" and was a feature of web brousers way before podcasts were invented by a former VH1 VJ, Adam Curry who put RSS together with iPods. Boiled down, all podcasting is is a link to a server that automatically downloads new episodes rather than you logging in to a web site and manually downloading.